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By David Rothman

imageRoad Show, a Hollywood comedy directed by the legendary Hal Roach, is a free public domain movie these days—with a little twist. One of the three screenwriters was Arnold Belgard (1907-1967), a distant relative on my late mother’s side of the family.

Three “Bonanza” and nine “Lassie” episodes were also among Belgard’s many scripts. What’s more, he wrote some dialogue for The Fabulous Joe, a talking dog movie, which is fitting since The Solomon Scandals is the only D.C. newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound doing a Truman send up at the Cosmos Club. No copyright jokes, please. Belgard’s Hollywood lucre stayed a long way from us. I don’t know how Road Show reached the public domain in the U.S., just that it’s in the PD category according to the Internet Archive.

For Road Show, based on a novel by Eric Hatch, here’s a synopsis accompanying the free Flash and download at the Archive: “Millionaire playboy Drogo Gaines (John Hubbard) gets cold feet at the altar and his gold digging bride gets him committed to an asylum. While there he meets Col. Carleton Carroway (Adolphe Menjou) who’s another millionaire there for a rest cure from his grabby family. The two make an escape and wind up in a carnival owned by Penguin Moore (Carole Landis) and from then on it’s one mad plot situation after another.”

More on the family angle: My sister and I had always known of a remote Rothman-Hollywood connection  but I’d never bothered to pin it down on the Net until a few days ago after Dorothy recalled Belgard’s name or at least something very close to it. I had been refining my bio for Scandals’ forthcoming segment on The Writing Show, which is based in the LA area. We still don’t know the exact family relationship, only that my mother used to talk about a relative who’d written “Bonanza” episodes.

Detail: There may well be other Belgard-related public domain freebies at the Archive. I just don’t have time to dig ‘em up now.

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